Simple Yet Profitable Business Idea

You could start it at home. It requires a small capital. It just takes a couple of days to setup. You would not believe how easy it is to run that anybody could do it. What kind of business am I talking about?

What kind of business am I talking about?
A Laundry Service. It is true. I know this because I setup one back in 1999. The project was ran in my parents' house. For equipment, I have a Whirlpool Twin Tab washing machine. It was a two-man operation - me and my college buddy. We shared the work load.

Secrets Shared
Early on, we knew we have some stiff competition. There are alot of people that are offering these type of service. Also, it was the time when Lavandera Ko (a known laundry franchise in the Philippines) is expanding. We knew that in order to succeed we have to differentiate ourselves from the rest. If you are planning to get into this business, here are some tips I will share with you.

1. Know and target a specific customer group. This is very important as this would help identify what strategy to use to attract the clients and away from your competitors. In Davao City, there are universities and colleges that attracts alot of students from the neighboring provinces. Being students ourselves, we have direct access to them and have personal insights to their attitude and behaviour.

2. Go to where the customers are. Unlike most of our competitors, we don't have a stall where the client's could drop their laundry so we go to them. This was not a problem for us as we offer free pick up and delivery. This convenience that we offer to the clients was the biggest factor for our success.

3. Offer something extra. This is somewhat tricky. As much as possible, you should offer something that would cost you the least if not cost you anything at all. We did this by offering "discounts" - for every four kilo of laundry, the client could add one more free. You say - this should cost us something. Well, it does not cost anything extra. You see, the amount of water, detergent and fabric softener used in a four kilogram load is the same as that for the five kilogram load. We are not really offering anything extra but the client's perceive that we are doing so - same effect.

4. Differentiate yourselves. This seems to be a daunting process. Most of the big companies spend alot of money on advertisements just to accomplish this. Would you believe we did this without spending so much? It was easy. For most of our clients, it was the first time for them to meet two twenty-something guys in a business pre-dominantly composed of women. We strengthen this by distributing business cards citing our designation as "lavandero".

5. Build and nurture relationships. Our strategy to do this involve some money. First, we make it a point to have conversations with the client (since we were also students, this was no problem). We remember birthdays, graduations or any other special occasions. At the very least, we would ensure that we remember to greet them and sometimes give small tokens. But there are other people that are important the we did not mention before. These are the landlords and caretakers of the facilities (dormitories, apartments, etc) that these students lived. These people are valuable contacts because we needed to deal with them longer than most students we had as clients. Because we had good relationships with them, they usually recommended us to our future clients - providing us continuity to our business.

If you want to start a business that is easy to setup and manage, I recommend this one. You could do this part-time on weekends and experience for yourself.